The Falkland Islands ... an historic minefield.Photograph: Enrique Marcarian/ReutersArgentinian school children are to be treated to a revised version of history with a new secondary school textbook accusing Britain of illegally "colonising" the Falkland Islands, writes Laura Smith.

According to the new tome, British forces arrived secretly on the islands, took them by force from the Spanish and have refused to discuss the island's sovereignty with Argentina ever since.

The British version of events - that it took formal possession in 1765 after finding them unoccupied and established a settlement a year later - is quite different.

Although the famous quote "History is written by the victors" doesn't quite apply in this case - given Argentina's defeat in the Falklands war and all - it's hardly the first time a nation has sought to rewrite its own past.

Last year, the Japanese government provoked outrage with the approval of a textbook whitewashing such episodes as forcing Asian women into sexual slavery and putting civilians into labour camps during the second world war, and abuses during its colonial rule of the Korean peninsula in the early 20th century.

The Japanese foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, went as far as asking China to "improve" its history education and remove "exhibits that do not represent fact" from its memorial to resistance against Japan.

At the time, China's was one of the loudest voices of outrage. But it turned out to have its own selective-memory issues.

Among the events omitted from Chinese history school books at the time were the killing of hundreds of demonstrators during the 1989 democracy movement, the estimated 30 million who starved to death during Mao's so-called Great Leap Forward, and China's attacks on India and Vietnam.

But before we get all high and mighty about these foreign antics, let's not forget our own equivalents. Just one is the Wilson government's categorisation in the 1960s of the Chagos Islands as "uninhabited" in a ruse to expel the 2,000-strong population to make way for a major US military base.

It appears when it comes to history there are episodes that we would all like to forget.